The Crikey Daily Mail’s hallowed Comments, Corrections, Clarifications and C*ck ups section is always jammed with heated arguments over climate science. In particular, there’s one regular commentator who manages to poke at this particular sore so effectively as to enrage and engage readers in a never ending tit for tat that, quite frankly, drives our production editor insane (we’re looking at you, Tamas Calderwood.)
So in the interests of creating a bit of breathing space in the email, and sharing the (not always informed) debate with Rooted readers, we’d like to present the CLIMATE CHANGE CAGE MATCH — a fight to the death.
There’s a robust discussion taking place on the Wilkins Ice Shelf (or what’s left of it) elsewhere on the blog, but the following debate will take place around the general consensus on climate change (yes, there are still a few out and proud sceptics who love to thrash it out and who are we to stop people from making fun of them?)
Picking up where we left off, here’s Tamas Calderwood from yesterday:
Stephen Morris (yesterday, comments) says that CO2 has recently increased to the “unprecedented” concentration of almost 0.0004 of our atmosphere and says this increase “almost exactly corresponds with the large temperature increases over the last 50-100 years”. First, CO2 has been more than 10x current levels in the past.
Second, what large temperature increases is he talking about? Once again, we’ve had zero warming in the past 10 years, less than 0.4C in the past thirty years and around 0.7C in the past hundred. The data are available to anyone with access to Google and the ability to type “temperature data”.
Ding ding ding! Play nice kids…
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Andrew,
I have emailed Sophie Black .pdf copies of the NGS Chart published August 2007. This is what I have been using for T, CO2 and SL readings over the last 400,000 years. Hopefully she can forward to you as a regular correspondent. There are also links to the talks by Prof Don Aitken of April and May 2008 (Ockham’s Razor – ABC Science Show)
Correct me if I am uninformed of your professional work, but I expect that you have not yourself “determined the paleo-temperature or sea levels of the glacial-interglacial era” and have used other’s original data, which puts you at the same degree of separation from it as the NGS. Hence it is hard to accept that the NGS data is incorrect on your say so.
Are you also discounting the Wikipedia Chart as a valid source of Holocene temperature data?
Not having seen the NGS chart until I received it this morning, what I suggested was it is always best to go to peer-reviewed reports in the science literature.
I have now seen the NGS chart, which appears in the main consistent with the original papers.
In so far as your original query relates to the relationships betwen T rise and SL rise, to gain an insight of the driving factors you need to look at the oset of the glacial terminations, i.e. the base of the upward-turning curve. As indicated in an earlier post, onset of T precedes onset of SL, although they may reach maxima about the same time.
Regarding Don Aitkins views, I have discussed them with with Aitkin directly in correspondence, and can send you the relevant summaries. Essentially Ainkin repeats the common 10 arguments which other “climate change skeptics” raise, and which have been accounted for earlier. Also, Clive Hamilton discussed Aitkin’s views in: http://newmatilda.com/2008/05/19/death-rattles-climate-change-skeptics
I doubt it we wish to trouble Sophie Black as an in-between messenger, so will indicate below my relevant online articles:
21.11.2008 Climate tipping points OpEdNews http://www.opednews.com/articles/21st-century-climate-tippi-by-Andrew-
Glikson-081121-208.html
Other on-line articles include:
Dangerous climate change. OpEdNews http://www.opednews.com/articles/Dangerous-Climate-Change–by-Andrew-
Glikson-081206-176.html
Andrew Glikson and I seem to be the only inmates left slugging it out in the vaunted Crikey Climate Change Cage Fight.
We are at the stage of ‘my data is better than your data’; just about the same as Glikson and Bolt in today’s Crikey.
I am trying to send Andrew Glikson the NGS data I have been quoting and Andrew is referring me to many technical papers, mainly Hansen’s NASA/GISS and UK Hadley Centre data.
Crikey – you have a problem. Either close down the Cage Fight and let us fight it out in the open, or redirect Gideon Polyna, Bolter and others into the cage.
Meanwhile check these links out to Prof Don Aitken’s talks on the ABC Science Show (Ockham’s Razor):
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2008/2232630.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2008/2226464.htm
Ken Lambert
My last comment is ‘awaiting moderation’ and no mention of the ‘Cage Fight’ blog in ‘Comments, corrections, clarifications, and c*ckups’ today.
It is time to declare *victory* and go home?
Wait! There’s more.
I’ve been contacted by two people intimately involved with Antarctic matters. They are somewhat angry that the empirical fact, that main continental readings provide no evidence of a warming trend is being submerged as one of them put it by inferred interpretations saying everyone on the ice is failing to understand that persistent falling values are really rising values.
I don’t detect that either person is a climate change denier for a moment. But they know that a reading is a reading, and feel that may comment about ‘zealotry’ in seeking to make Antarctica conform were fair.
One thing that has always plunged me into hot water as a reporter is to fail to adhere rigidly to ‘established’ views. This is especially true in my main area of interest at least in the media, which is air transport. So I don’t care about being flamed. It saves me on heating bills up here in the highlands.
I’m confident I’ve made the right choice in not investing the time needed to read Plimer. The imperatives of industrially forced climate change, irrespective of the natural inputs for hotter or colder, make the need for action to reduce the massive rates of carbon release from fossil sources a policy and technology priority. What nature cools nature also can heat. We can’t stuff around making excuses anymore when what we do is magnifying and accelerating those climate change forces.
But, a surface reading is a surface reading.
In so far as local and trasient warming/cooling processes are focused on, the evidence of the Greenland and Antarctica ice cores needs to be borne in mind, namely the sharp warming and cooling events over periods as short as a few dacades and even a few years (Steffensen et al., 2008; Kobash et al., 2008; Lenton et al., 2007). Thus, rapid warming resulting in discharge of cold ice melt into the North Atlantic resulted in the 12.9 – 11.7 kyr ‘Youngest dryas’ cooling, with similar events at 8.5 kyr. Observations and future projections of the behaviour of the cryosphere need to take the possibility of such developments into account, i.e. cooling of the North Atlantic if and when the Gulf Stream fails, and cooling of the southern oceans as west Antarctica melts.
Such sharp perturbations may last tens to hudreds of years. With current rates of global climate changes, including increasing variability of the ENSO, such as the strong 1998 El-Nino peak and the 2007-09 La Nina, the precise behaviour of the ice sheets under fast rising global tempratures is difficult to predict
.
What Andrew Glikson fails to mention is that East Antarctica is four times the size of West Antarctica (divided by the Transantarctic Mountains). Antarctica in total holds about 90% of the world’s ice. According to Dr Ian Allison (Australian Antarctic Division glacialogy program head); ‘Sea ice conditions have remained stable in Antarctica generally’ and ‘Sea ice losses in West Antarctica over the past 30 years have been more than offset by increases in the Ross Sea – just one of the sectors in East Antarctica’.
IPCC AR4 published in 2007 deliberately excludes Antarctica as warming at all; and yet the latest revelation is that Antarctica has been warming for the last 50 years. As if the data was not there in 2007, so much so that ‘Antarctica’ is specifically excluded – and within 2 years it was found – and found to be warming by the requisite 0.2 dec C.
Is it any wonder we are called ‘sceptics’.
Off to the coast for the labour day long weekend – pray I survive rising sea levels until next Tuesday.
Andrew Glikson,
I forgot to mention – please give us your reading of the NGS Chart for the onsets of SL rise and T rise for the last 3 interglacials going back 400,000 years. By onset I mean the point where SL is a minimum and then starts a continuous rise, and similarly for T.
Ken Lambert
(1) The draft IPCC 2007 was submitted in 2005 before the NSIDC and NASA centre presented their reports.
(2) West Antarctica warmed by 0.17C per decade over the last 50 years and East + West Antarctica by 0.12C per decade (http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/)
(3) Large thermal anomalies over west Antarctica are 3 to 4 degrees C higher than the 1951-1980- base line (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/, ).
(4) While East Antarctica has warmed around the coast where glaciers discharge, it remains stable at large parts of the centre, probably due to accelerating vortex wind chill speed and depletion of the ozone layer.
(5) We all pray and hope East Antarctica will hold, but further emissions of CO2 and a rise of mean global temperatures to and above 2 degrees C are not going to help East Antarctica remains stable!
(6) Constant questioning, namely skepticism, is inherent in the scientific method and is exercised by all scientists.
(7) We do not start from an assumption (such as “the globe is warming”, or “is not warming”, or “warming is anthropogenic”) but examine any proposition from all angles and all points of view.
(8) It seems those who deny global warming are making an assumption, then continue to look for faults, real or imaginary in the science.
(9) Any one seriously concerned regarding climate change, needs to read the excellent (although at this time outdated by 3 years) reports of the IPCC, the collective work of the worlds expert climate scientists.
(10) Had there been evidence that the injection of over 300 billion tons of Carbon gases into the atmosphere is not having deleterious effects on the atmopshere, we could have all breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“(8) It seems those who deny global warming are making an assumption, then continue to look for faults, real or imaginary in the science.”
Andrew, I could say the very same thing about advocates of AGW warming theory.
They started with data showing temperature rise over the last 40-50 years, found atmospheric CO2 rising at the same time, and formulated a theory of CO2 driven warming. Computer models were constructed with several known variables then run forward to make future predictions. Alarming results were obtained with various inputs.
The computer models don’t run well backwards, supposedly because the input variable data is not well known from the past.
In the last 10 years, temperatures have flattened or cooled, and other observations have diverged from predictions (such as East Antarctica).
The scientific method involvs proposing theory from observations, testing theory against future observations and modifying or discarding theory which cannot be made to fit new or better observations.
AGW CO2 driven warming theory predicts steeper warming, and greater climate variability. When warming does not occur for 10 years (out of the last 40 years), then it must be greater climate variability – not a cause for a hard look or modification of the theory to fit the observations. And despite growing data from the historical record, computer models do not accurately duplicate the Holocene or the last 400,000 years, which in logic would separate out the background ‘noise’ of natural factors.
Ken Lambert – Schoneveld’s quote is fantastic. Thanks. It’s funny because I vaguely believed in climate change for a while. But like you I get suspicious of panics and hysterias. This panic is a doozy but I think their case is starting to fall apart. Logic, as they say, is persistent.
Tamas Calderwood – mate – good to make contact. The sweet thing about Dr Schoneveld’s experiment is that anyone can repeat it with access to Google – and it works just as described. It seems that the AGW theorists have vacated the cage. I had declared myself the cage fight winner (as the last one left), but maybe we can lure the AGW theorists back for a knockout round. I was hoping Crikey would then anoint us as the official “AGW deniers” with regular paid pieces in the front pages of Crikey; in the interests of Crikey’s vaunted journalistic balance and good taste.
Ken – brother – you can be my “AGW denier” wingman anytime. I’ve read all your comments and I love them. This issue is fascinating, don’t you think? Full credit to Crikey for giving our heretical views a run though. We go against the “house view” but they still print them. Respect.
I found the proposition about google searches interesting and worth a test. Intuitively I thought that there might be some basis to the view that people inevitably focus on the worst.
Here are some results:
Climate change adverse impacts on forests: 250,000
Climate change positive impacts on forests: 2,340,000
Climate change increased ocean productivity: 159,000
Climate change decreased ocean productivity: 83,900
Climate change increased crop productivity: 201,000
Climate change decreased crop productivity: 195,000
Climate change increased bad weather: 241,000
Climate change decreased bad weather: 177,000
Climate change averse impacts on health: 22,400,000
Climate change positive impacts on health: 20,400,000.
I then tried:
improved forest productivity climate change: 206,000
reduced forest productivity climate change: 208,000
I will be frank in stating that I am not sure what the above means, but I would be hesitating to take too much from it at all – certainly not when bark beetles are creaming north american forests. I would have expected the actual hits for the forest productivity to have the very heavy ‘bias’ resulting from the inclusion of bark beetle hits. But it does not look like the case. (One of the bark beetle species killing millions of hectares of forest is normally limited in population numbers by runs of very low winter minima, but not any more.)
Boerwar,
I think Dr Schoneveld was analysing the quality not just the quantity of the Google searches eg; “you will never find butterflies thriving and cockroaches suffering” in correlations with global warming.
“Climate change” is also a popular but inaccurate description for AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Climate change is never disputed by the serious sceptic, it’s always been happening and always will. That is a part of my sceptical position – separation of ‘naturally driven climate change’ from the human driven variety (AGW).
I recently Googled some solar energy companies to see what it was like to take advantage of the $8000 Federal Govt subsidy for domestic PV Solar installation.
A 1.04kW ‘home power station’ with grid feed inverter cost about $12000. It saved about $0.81 (81 cents) per day in coal fired grid power usage which averaged about $300 per year. This will produce the power output of a domestic frypan.
Without the subsidy it would take $12000/300 = 40 years to pay for itself. With the $8000 taxpayer subsidy it would cost a net $4000 and take about 13 years to pay for itself.
Scaling up to 3kW and 6kW ‘home power stations’ cost about $40,000 and $80,000 respectively, and the $8000 subsidy off these systems took the payoff periods to 35 years and 40 years.
The PV solar panels were warrantied for 20 years, and other components 10 years.
Assuming the PV panels have a usable life of 35-40 years, they just pay for themselves when ready to be replaced (and this ignores any interest cost on the initial capital over 35 – 40 years).
To be commercially viable, a 7-10 year payback period would be reasonable, and this would require a cost reduction for PV solar to 20-25% of current costs. ie 4-5 times cheaper than at present.
For those who see all the house roofs in Australia covered in PV solar panels, (just 4000 km2), please supply a working cost model.
I think I will wait for the next generation of PV Solar – one that actually produces a saleable surplus of energy and is not a cost black hole subsidised by cheap coal fired energy.
Perhaps someone with a bigger brain than I, could advise what the energy economics of PV solar would be if coal fired energy generated at 4-5 cents per kWh was subsituted by PV solar energy at many times that cost in a closed system.
Would you be able to make the silicon wafer, glass, aluminium, etc which composes a solar panel with the energy produced by that panel over its lifetime? If not the whole PV solar enterprise is unsustainable at current costs and efficiencies without cross subsidy by much cheaper energy sources – an energy black hole.
Ken, your grade for your essay is D-. Although your grasp of basic arithmetic is sound there are a number of problems that need to be addressed if you are to produce work of acceptable quality.
Firstly, you appear to be under the misapprehension that the correct unit of accounting for energy calculations is the dollar. It is in fact the Watt (or Joules per second). In this light, the energy payback time of solar, hydro, wind, geothermal, or any other renewable energy is far more interesting than their dollar cost. Watts are a more suitable unit of measurement than dollars becuase their rate of production is fixed, wheras dollar costs vary over time, and because they much more closely mirror the nature of the good being produced.
Secondly, while you’re eager to point out the subsidy involved in solar production, you make no effort to point out the governmnent subsidies enjoyed by the fossil fuel producers, which are substantial. Because they are well established, subsidy of fossil fuel energy inherrently appears more efficient per watt than renewable energies at their current stage in the market are realising the full potental of economies of scale and technological maturity. With appropriate investment into R&D and infrastructure, there is no reason why renewable energy technology can not be in precisely the same position after some period of time.
Thirdly, despite substantial dataavailable (example is not comprehensive) that shows that photovoltaics, the most inefficient of the solar technologies have a short net energy payback time, you present this notion as if it is speculative and unproven.
In summary, I am disappointed in your work this term. While you can clearly write on subjects that interest you, you are unwilling to deal with ideas that do not fit your preconceptions. I hope that after the upcoming holidays, that you apply yourself more thoroughly to your work and make an effort to develop a more balanced view.
Welcome to the cage kdkd. I presume that the others have left because I made a good argument or a real stink.
I had a look at your ‘substantial data’ about the payback period in erergy terms for PV solar. The number is 1 up to 2.7 years. Amazing. Then Snow White – why is PV solar so expensive?
The data is not clear on whether *all* the energy inputs required to make a ‘solar home power system’ have been included – or just the discrete manufacturing of the PV cell itself with the raw materials ignored.
eg; to get all the energy inputs I would expect to include the aluminium, glass, labour, fuel etc etc right back to bauxite in the ground and sand on the beach.
In fact, that is what a dollar cost represents. In any industrial product chain, the raw material of one link is the end product of another. Excluding profits and royalties, all the cost in any product is represented by human labour (an energy absorber) and the energy contribution of every process involved. So the dollar cost should proportion to the total energy expended in making any product.
If PV solar is 1-2.7 years (say 2 years) in energy payback, then coal fired energy must be several times less ie. about 6 months. Seems very short doesn’t it?
The tough thing about solar is that the sun can’t be talked into squirting more than about 1 kW per sq.m onto the surface of Earth, so no matter what gadget you use, the collection area will only reduce with greater PV efficiency and that generally means greater cost.
Perhaps kdkd you can start putting numbers on your assertions, and we will see how they stack up.
Ken: Plenty of life cycle analysis stuff for you to sink your teeth into here. Interestingly a lot of it seems to be calculated in the fairly far northern hemisphere. Having said that, asking me to do the research component of your assignment for you is simply unacceptable.
Your penultimate paragraph doesn’t make much sense, PV is only one approach to solar, solar isn’t the only renewable channel. 1KW per M2 is quite a lot by the way, but as any skeptic will tell you, it doesn’t work for solar at night time, and needs a lot of geographic optimisation. The sun’s failure to consistently shine is a further optimisation problem that’s presented as intractable by the skeptics.
Coal fired energy will never have an energy payback time, as you just have to keep digging it out of the ground, and once it’s burned, there’s no getting it back. That’s what non-renewable means! Also unlike renewable energy, the amount of energy generated by fossil fuels will never exceed the embedded energy within the material itself. With renewables, there’s an existing constant flux of energy (which is input at a fixed rate) that you can tap into, but you have to invest into constructing the tap first.
Don’t buy your econobabble about dollar/energy correlations. Maybe that stuff works in an idealised scenario (aka model), but the political economy distorts that substantially.
So I’m afraid I’m unable to reconsider my grade of D-. I suspect that the reason it went quiet here was due to excessive amounts of nonsense being spouted by so-called-skeptics staring at the tips of their own noses.
And for those of you who have not got assignments due and failing grades, according to
Keoleian and Lewis (1997) in the mid-90s the payback time was between 1.2 and 7.4 years, depending on location and whether the installed module was frameless or not. I’m guessing that this has improved somewhat since then.
G. A. Keoleian and G. M. D. Lewis, “Application of life-cycle energy analysis to photovoltaic module design,” Progress in photovoltaics: Research and Applications 5, no. 4 (1997).
kdkd
I hope you have invested in a sturdy tap to suck energy out of the flux about us.
You will need one which pays for itself well before it wears out. I will be happy to subsidize it with tax dollars to the same proportion as coal fired energy.
As for econobabble and standardised abuse of the skeptics – well we shall all know in 10 years or so who reality is mugging.
Still the question remains; Snow White – why is PV solar so expensive?
As for your grades – you can insert them where the sun don’t shine.
Ken: PV is expensive because all forms of electricity generation that don’t have a component where electricity is generated via heat or kinetic energy are inherrently complex, and therefore likely expensive . PV does have the advantage that compared to power station they don’t suffer from ( aprox 30%) transmission losses, because the energy is used at source.
I have invested in an evacuated tube solar hot water system, which is inherrently much more efficient than either PV or the traditional flat plate solar collectors for hot water (53-150% more efficient than the flat plate collectors in my region, I don’t have figures for absolute efficiency though). Although installing them was very expensive, it’s very nice to have a tap into the flux of energy above us, and to only have to put the electric booster on 4 or 5 times a year.
From an energetic perspective it makes no sense to avoid renewable energy techs, as, to repeat what I said earlier, reneable energy will usually generate more energy than is embedded within the materials used to make the generator. This is never the case with fossil fuel energy. In economic terms, while not exactly a free lunch, it is a very very cheap lunch, which I guess is why the big polluters feel threatened by long-term investment away from their sector.
kdkd
I would have through a coal fired plant was vastly more complex than a PV solar panel or solar hot water collector. Solar hot water makes some economic sense, and has been around for a long time but is still around the 7-10 year payback in dollars, so consumers are not rushing to buy.
Boilers, Steam Turbines, Condensing & Feedheating plant, Precipitators, High Pressure Water and Steam Pipework, Cooling Plant etc…all complex but well developed technologies.
I note that the energy payback periods for PV solar at just 5% efficiency (1997) were in the 1-7 year range and the aluminium frame was a significant factor.
At an average energy payback of say 5 years, and with a 35 year life for the latest PV, we should see an energy surplus of about 6 times the original energy input to make and install the PV system.
Given that all the energy to make PV solar panels and componentry are produced in a non-renewable energy economy (coal fired, nuclear, hydro, etc), perhaps you could cite a study which examines whether PV solar can reproduce itself in a closed system where the only input is PV solar generated energy. By all means include the best location such as Phoenix or Alice Springs for the sums.
If that is the case, I suggest you have a ideal re-education community for serial AGW ‘deniers’ and other skeptics when ‘AGW denial’ becomes a criminal offence. In such a place, we can stamp out PV Solar panels instead of numberplates and grow rich on the energy surpluses we produce – and live happily ever after.
Previous post; first line …. “I would have *thought*….not through
Ken, the technology underlying coal/oil/gas generation is simple. You take something with high energy chemical bonds and you oxidise them, and this creates heat which you use to boil water. It’s just basic science developed by Newton, Lavoisier and others. In fact, the whole burning things with high embodied energy is stone age technology.
PV on the other hand relies on our understinding of quantum mechanics for us to be able to make them work. They require precision manufacturing at atomic scales.
Your other point is interesting, but it’s just a matter of infrastructure, at least for the energy requirements of these systems (feedstock is a longer term problem that is less acute if we stop burning so much oil). Perhaps good policy would be to phase out across the board subsidy for fossil fuel producers and re-target them to fossil fuel producers whose products are used to create renewable infrastructure. Eventually the economics of the energy production should reach critical mass so that renewables beget renewables.
kdkd
Happy to phase out all subsidies for fossil fuels and let renewables fight it out on a level playing field.
Dubious about the idea of ‘build it and they will beget’.
Like to see some analysis of the ‘tipping point’ in cost where a PV solar panel reproduces itself let alone (god forbid) 1.5 little PV’s
Andrew Glikson has escaped the cage – and his needle is caught in the groove…
When you look at the whole AGW case, it nearly all rests on the last 40-50 years of ‘recent proxy’ temperature readings, and the human release of CO2 over the ‘industrial revolution’.
Well, the industrial revolution really only got going from about 1800 onward, and CO2 levels had only risen to about 310ppm by 1950.
Temperatures started continuously rising from a trough in about 1650, which is roughly 200 years *before* CO2 levels started a more rapid rise around 1850. Warming was happening anyway, and its (non-CO2) contribution (noise) to the observed rise is never discussed in the AGW story.
The Holocene has been remarkably stable (compared with previous interglacials) with a 0.5 degree C cooling trend over the last 8000 years, and the Wikipedia averaged chart shows approx nine (9) peak-trough temperature swings in the amplitude range of about 0.4 degC. All of which is natural background ‘noise’.
Hence a logical proposition is to run your climate change models backwards with reasonably well known input data (the historical record) and see how accurately they duplicate the known temperature proxies. If the backwards correlations were accurate, then we could have much higher confidence that the background ‘noise’ of natural climate forcings was being correctly modelled, and crucially; that any industrially released CO2 and other GHG effects could be separated out.
Consider the logical absurdity that climate models run very poor correlations backwards with known historical data, yet are trumpeted by AGW theorists as reliable predictors of the future where the input factors going forward are increasingly unknown or just plainly unknowable 40-50 years hence.
Never has the rate of CO2 released from fossil fuel burning and land use been higher than in the last 10 years, yet global temperatures are flat or slightly falling.
What AGW theorists rarely discuss is the role CO2 plays in cooling mechanisms which have peaked and reversed the last 3 interglacials. Icemelt/ocean albedo and re-freezing feedbacks are stated to be the most important mechanisms. Andrew Glikson has stated that the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system is sensitive to even minor forcings and temperature changes of 0.2 to 0.4 deg C have ended civilizations. All of which happened without human release of ‘industrial’ scale CO2 at all!
The exact role CO2 plays when the system is cooling is still vague. In the case of Prof Karoly’s ‘Swindle’ debate, his CO2 played an incoherent game of ocean absorption/release /feedback/warming – always warming, with icemelt/ocean albedo thrown in to boot! The exact scale of absorption of CO2 by the world’s oceans is largely unknown.
Last week ‘The Economist’ Science & Technology section (23May09) reported that jelly fish like thaliaceans (a type of gelatinous chordate) are one third carbon by weight and in their billions could sink *twice* as much carbon to the ocean bottom as dead planktonic algae; hitherto assumed to be the main way of sinking carbon to the ocean bottom. “The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle – something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works”.
Without reasonable confidence in the current climate models (gained by accurate backward correlations), who could reasonably argue that CO2 is a major forcing, when Dr Glikson’s ‘minor’ forcings (all natural factors) have caused major climate change in the historical record?
The Antarctica story is critical. AGW theorists have recently found ‘continental’ warming, when respected scientists on the spot find a 30 year cooling trend, and increased East Antarctic ice outweighing lost West Antractic ice. East Antarctica is 4 times bigger than West Antarctica. At 90% of the Earth’s ice, Antarctica is the big knob on the Earth’s thermostat – vastly bigger than all the other global glaciers, ice sheets and the Arctic combined.
A vast climate change edifice is therefore based on 30-40 years of data, with the last 10 years being discounted as a ‘weather anomaly’ by AGW theorists.
Much of the edifice has been based on James Hansen’s NASA/GISS construction of the data. Given the Earth’s vast history of natural climate change, sometimes abrupt and disruptive; a logical thinker would conclude that a lot more than 30-40 years of data is needed to verify the CO2 driven warming theory.
Ken: “Interesting” parroting of the same old boring stuff. A nice remix of a variety of climate skeptic talking points. So as to not waste too many electrons, here’s some starting points to help you improve your grade next time.
1. [There's nothing happening stage of denial, contradictory evidence] 100 years is not enough: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/01/one-hundred-years-is-not-enough.php
2. [There's nothing happening stage of denial, inadequate evidence]: Warming stopped in 1998: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.php
3. [[There's nothing happening stage of denial, contradictory evidence] The temperature records are unreliable: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/temperature-record-reliability-attack.php
Because this time you have creatively knitted together various climate change sceptic talking points into a semi-coherent rant, in a way that makes it superficially appear that it’s not just the same-old-same-old argument, I’ll give you an improved grade of D+, but as you’re basically still failing to examine the evidence thoroughly and in a balanced way then it’s still a failing grade.
kdkd – please grade the following.
1) Mars, Jupiter and Pluto are all experiencing Global Warming. It seems unlikely that Earth’s warming is independent of theirs.
2) Solar cycles, plate tectonics, volcanic activity, changes in Earth’s orbit, changes in the Sun’s position relative to the gravitational centre of the solar system, ocean currents and many other natural factors all play a part in the climate system. On what basis do we assume that all those factors remain equal while an increase of CO2 to 0.0004 of the atmosphere has driven all recent warming?
3) History shows that periods of warmth tend to be better for human society. Why are we panicking about a very small increase in the observed temperature over 100 years?
4) The latest UAH data shows May 2009 was just 0.04C above the 30 year mean temperature. Why are temperatures flat while CO2 levels are increasing?
Tamas,
You know that you can go and visit the how to talk to a cliamte change sceptic pages yourself, you don’t need me to do it for you (it’s at http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php). Nice little grab bag of sceptic talking points here though, although I must say that Ken did a better job of confabulation (that’s a psychological term for making things up into a coherent story) than your selection of bullet points.
So: 1. It’s interplanetary global warming. (comes under the category that Climate change is [exclusively] natural, but this is really an extension of the claim that it’s the sun causing climate change. Short answer, no there has been no increase in solar radiation reaching earth since around 1940. Longer answer: have a look at the pages linked from here: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/its-sun-stupid.php . I’m a particular fan of the realclimate.org blog as it’s written by real scientists, not pretend ones outside of their field like me.
2. A nice grab bag, but not coherently put at all. We already covered the sun. Ocean currents aren’t an independent variable in this system (if you don’t understand what this means, then your grasp of scientific method is so tenuous then you’ve got a big problem with the legitimacy of your opinion). The plate tectonics argument is nonsense (http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/10/global-warming-comes-from-within.php). There’s a general lack of detail here that smacks of grasping at straws. As for the “there’s no proof that CO2 is causing global warming argument”, you can pick up any number of textbooks from the 1950s onwards that will explain the physics to you. Or you can read this: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/there-is-no-proof-that-co2-is-causing.php .
3. The “a warmer world would be better” argument. Classic intellectual incoherence. You start by saying it doesn’t matter anyway, and then continue with an even if it does matter, then it doesn’t matter statement. “It’s not where it is, it’s how fast it’s moving”. http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/whats-wrong-with-warm-weather.php .
4. This is the “it was cold to day in Wagga Wagga” and as such is worthy of nothing but derision. http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/its-cold-today-in-wagga-wagga.php
So overall this scrapes an
E-. Lacks intellectual coherence (unlike the opposite argument that AGW is a problem) and generally shows little more than the ability of the poster to memorise a few talking points.
3. Global warming is better for humanity.
kdkd
Last week The Economist’s Science & Technology section (23May09) reported that jelly fish like thaliaceans (a type of gelatinous chordate) are one third carbon by weight and in their billions could sink twice as much carbon to the ocean bottom as dead planktonic algae; hitherto assumed to be the main way of sinking carbon to the ocean bottom. “The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle — something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works”.
Indeed, if the previously understood *main way* of sinking carbon to the ocean bottom by dead planktonic algae was given the magnitude of 1 unit, our Economist’s newly discovered thaliacean pump would add two units; making a total carbon pump of magnitude three units. Our main way has just been tripled. Seems like a worthwhile addition to computer models, especially when one carbon absorption variable is tripled and then compounded for 40 years to tell us what the temperature will be in 2050.
Tamas,
kdkd is Crikey’s talent scout – marking our cards. This is for the paid job of ‘official AGW denier’. You get to do an Andrew Glikson in the numbered pages and live happily ever after.
kdkd
I checked out Coby Beck – seems like a gifted amateur just like me. He even quoted the Wikipedia Holocene Temperature Chart which I sent to Crikey before the ‘Cage Fight’ was started and which is extensively discussed in earlier postings of this blog. All Coby needs to get the temperature story right is read these postings.
I hope you don’t get all your information from gifted amateurs.
I was rather hoping you had sorted out the *PV Solar begetting PV Solar* question by now; and was looking forward to marking your answer.
131
I hope that thaliaceans are putting huge amounts of carbon into ocean sinks – to the extent that this bio-feedback is so powerful that it is capable of stopping CO2 global warming in its tracks. It would suit me fine.
To me, though, it seems that Thaliaceans are a useful priority for further research. In the interim, it might be useful to use a few caveats when discussing the role of the thaliaceans in global carbon sequestration.
In relation to this, your statement is fairly clear and definite: ‘Our main way has just been tripled.’
What the article actually said was:
‘But the discovery of just how carbon-rich and prone to sinking thaliaceans are may change that assumption.’ (The assumption that planktonic algae are the main biological agent for sinking carbon in oceans). Note the ‘may’.
‘He (the researcher) admits it is difficult to make accurate comparisons, because the research is still in its infancy. But he estimates that the “jelly pump”, as he refers to it, sinks almost twice as much carbon as algae do. Note both the ‘difficulty in making accurate comparisons’ and the ‘estimates’.
‘The question is, does that carbon stay down once it has arrived? That is unclear.’ Note the ‘unclear’.
Thus there are some significant questions before your logical jump from ‘may’, ‘estimates’ and ‘unclear’ to black and white certainty could be reasonably sustained.
Where is the peer review science for this article?
Where is the quantitave analysis demonstrating that the total quantum of carbon being sunk by thaliaceans is three times that of planktonic algae?
As it happens, we do know something about the distribution of thaliaceans. Their biomass is ‘highly variable’.
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/JO/abstract/5703/57030361.html
The article is really just a bit of a speculative chat about what might be true. I would regard it as a useful lead for some serious oceanographic research.
It is far from something that could sustain the assertion, ‘That the main way has just been tripled.’
It may be that the climate models should include thaliaceans as having a significant global impact on Carbon sequestration but that would have to be based on a bit more than a largely speculative chat.
Ken: There’s no way you can be described as a gifted amateur. I don’t see any evidence that you do anything other than cherry pick evidence and jump to conclsions based on isolated data points. Coby’s “How to talk to a climate change sceptic” (http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php) work is comprehensive, well cited to popular and professional scientific sources and paints an intellectually coherent picture of multiple interacting bits of evidence where the whole is greater than the sum of thier parts. You on the other hand show a good ability to think in a contrarian way, but your jellyfish booboo suggests that you’re confusing contrarian with critical/sceptical.
As for renewables begetting renewables, I would have thought that the answer would be obvious. Once there’s a surplus of renewable energy in the system (a fair way off, and requires quite a lot of new infrastructure at this stage) then you can do what you like with the surplus. Of course getting a surplus of renewables requires quite a lot of infrastructure, and efficiency gains, but there’s nothing a-priori from stopping this.
kdkd and Boerwar:
I treat the ‘Economist’ reports with the same reverence as AGW theorists treat the offerings of Jim Hansen of NASA/GISS.
I thought the ‘could’ in the first paragraph was sufficient to quantify the uncertainty about the ‘jelly pump’. My extrapolation that *our main way has just been tripled* is still covered by the overarching ‘could’.
Economist Quote: “The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle — something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works”. Endquote
The Economist’s final sentence seems confident enough about the research conclusions. Their information is usually pretty good but like all AGW theories – subject to further research and refinement and the possibility of sinking without trace.
Seems a lot more than ‘speculative chat’ though – bit of a booboo that!
It is interesting Boerwar that your trying to cast doubt on the importance of the Thaliaceans is a bit like the skeptics expressing similar doubts over the ‘coulds’ and ‘mights’ in documents such as IPCC AR4. How does it feel when the boot is on the other foot?
kdkd:
Is Boewar’s piece supposed to be my ‘jellyfish booboo’. Please read the above.
I would certainly place more credence in the ‘Economist’ than Coby Beck. But as Prof Don Aitken says; ‘to paraphrase Einstein; all it takes is one contraverting experiment to be right and the whole theory collapses’. Or words to that effect.
Anyway, I am flattered with my elevation in the contrarian stakes.
I am glad that you confirm my point about PV Solar and seem to extend it to all renewables ie. renewables cannot beget renewables.
Your quote: *Once there’s a surplus of renewable energy in the system (a fair way off, and requires quite a lot of new infrastructure at this stage) then you can do what you like with the surplus. Of course getting a surplus of renewables requires quite a lot of infrastructure, and efficiency gains, but there’s nothing a-priori from stopping this.*
Love that – reads like an application for a research grant.
As if the ‘surplus’ wasn’t what humankind and its industrial civilization live off!!
How about a few ‘peer reviewed numbers’ to let us all know when is a ‘fair way off’ and how much infrastructure (with how much embedded energy) is required for say Wind, PV Solar, Geothermal, Tidal, Fumaroles etc.
PS (By the way, I always thought Geothermal was a very good idea and cheap enough to bolt on to existing steam turbine technology – but it seems to be another ‘gunna’ . ‘Gunna’ happen soon.)
Gentlemen (and Ladies if such be into Cage Fighting)
Sorry to post two in a row but I could not resist this cocky rant from another fight.
“Business will exist in any climate in a market driven economy. If CO2 warming theory gets a run and Government is the buyer of ‘black hole’ renewables – business with sing from that song sheet to make a dollar.
When the AGW theorists can run their models backwards and duplicate the Holocene with accuracy; when the IPCC explains what happened to the Mann ‘hockeystick’ and where went the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age; and when Ian Plimer recants and seeks Jim Hansen’s forgiveness – then I will gladly become a convert to the established religion of CO2 driven warming. Meanwhile, tune in for more heresy from Tamas and yours truly!”
Ken,
Personally I go to the Economist for an intelligent layman’s appreciation of political economy. Go to the New Scientist or the Scientific American for an equivalent rag on scientific issues. In the case of the jellyfish, I’ve found you the original paper here: http://aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_54/issue_4/1197.html , or you can grab the fulltext from this page: http://aslo.org/lo/toc/vol_54/issue_4/index.html . So, according to the paper itself this is a near-coastal phenomenon. It’s also occuring in a part of the ocean that according to my oceanography book (Pinet 1998) is in a part of the ocean that has some of the highest primary productivity in the world. It’s also worth noting that it’s an observational study, not experimental, so the conclusions we can draw from it are limited. It would appear that the writer in the Economist here has overreached themselves trying to create a biosequestration angle. So while it may well be an interesting addition to the carbon cycle, the magnitude of the effect is highly unlikely to be as large as we would like it to be. It’s clear from the paper that the authors present this as a part of a nutrient cycling process, not a sequestration process, which is removal of components from the system.
Onto part two. You clearly have an ability to conflate economic and political issues with scientific and engineering issues. In terms what you can do with it, energy generated from renewables is no different from energy generated from fossil fuels. If politicians and lobbyists hadn’t spent the best part of my life wasting our time clinging to outmoded 19th century ways of doing things, it’s likely that the political and economic barriers would have been breached many years ago and we’d be well on the way to a self-sustaining renewables industry (no, not a perpetual motion machine).
And finally, I’m sick of doing your research for you. How about you dig out the numbers on self-sustaining renewables if it’s so interesting to you?
Peer Reviewers, your review of ECOENG’s piece would be interesting. The Leipzig Institute of Marine Science is hardly a crackpot outfit. Maybe the Thaliaceans have a hand in this warming hiatus.
ECOENG writes:
“On 1 May 2008 Keenlyside and others of Germany’s Leipzig Institute of Marine Science, published a paper in ‘Nature’ forecasting no additional global warming “over the next decade.”
Al Gore and his minions will continue to chant that “the science is settled” on global warming, but the only thing settled is that there has not been any since 1998. Critics of this view (rightfully) argue that 1998 was the warmest year in modern record, due to a huge El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean, and that it is unfair to start any analysis at a high (or a low) point in a longer history. But starting in 2001 or 1998 yields the same result: no warming.
The Keenlyside team found that natural variability in the Earth’s oceans will “temporarily offset” global warming from carbon dioxide. Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is oceanic; hence, what happens there greatly influences global temperature.
It is now known that both Atlantic and Pacific temperatures can get “stuck,” for a decade or longer, in relatively warm OR cool patterns. The North Atlantic is now forecast to be in a cold stage for a decade, which will help put the damper on any global warming. Another long term Pacific temperature pattern (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation); PDO) is also forecast not to push warming either.
Proponents of aggressive legislation like to point to the 2007 science compendium from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In it there are dozens of computer-driven projections for 21st-century warming.
Not one of them projected that the earth’s natural climate variability will shut down global warming from carbon dioxide for two decades. Yet, that is just what appears to be happening.
If you think about it, all we really possess to project the future of complex natural systems such as the Earth’s climate, are computer models. Therefore, if the models that serve as the basis for policy do not work – and that must be the conclusion if indeed we are at the midpoint of a two-decade hiatus in global warming – then there is no verifiable science behind the current hysteria.
What does this mean for the future? If warming is “temporarily offset” for two decades, does all the “offset” warming suddenly appear with a vengeance, or is it delayed?
Computer models, like the one used by Keenlyside, et al., rely on “positive feedbacks” to generate much of their warming. First, atmospheric carbon dioxide warms things up a bit. Then the ocean follows, raising the amount of atmospheric water vapor, which is a greater source of global warming than carbon dioxide. When the ocean does not warm up, it seems that the additional warming is also delayed.
All of this may mean that we have simply overestimated the amount of warming that results from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. What the climate zealots are incapable of acknowledging is that this final point has actually been a subject of much debate for over a decade. This is the core issue that makes their claims of a ‘consensus’ or ‘the science is settled’ laugably naive.
A significant number of recent publications in the peer-reviewed literature argue that observed changes in temperature show the “sensitivity” of temperature to increasing carbon dioxide is lower than earlier estimates.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, this currently suggests a 21st-century warming trend that will be near to, or lower than the minimum value calculated by the climate models in the IPCC compendium. But who really knows? Before Keenlyside dropped his bombshell, few scientists would have said publicly that global warming could stop for two decades. Anyone raising that possibility would doubtlessly have been treated to the smug reply that “the science is settled,” and that only the most bumptious ignoramus could raise such a question.
The only ‘thing’ that currently appears “settled” is the politics, NOT the science and we all know what a transient and illusory thing ‘political truth’ is!
Pressures to pass impossible-to-achieve legislation, are based upon projections of rapid and persistent global warming. The truth is: current science no longer provides justification for any mad rush to pass drastic global warming legislation.”
136
My comments were not based on the authority of individuals or of journals. So I will regard your comments on those as being germane to red herrings and not thaliaceans.
My comments were based on the internal inconsistency of the article, the lack of peer review, the complete lack of quantitive analysis, and the various uncertainties specified in the body of the article. I now add the observation that none of these acknowledged uncertainties were quantified so there is no scientific basis for statements relating to degrees of probability, let alone certainty.
Being sceptical, I assessed the article as having real value as speculation rather than providing a statistically rigorous, peer reviewed conclusion which has any weight at all. Clearly, the contribution of thaliaceans to oceanic carbon sinks needs the proper quantitative scientific attention which to date it has not had. You may differ. If so, I am prepared to acknowledge that your benchmarks for scepticism may differ from mine.
You raise the point that I have doubts about the thaliaceans. I do indeed, and so do the researchers in the article. They specify the quality of these uncertainties in the article but not the quantitative parameters of the uncertainties. I have itemised these uncertainties above. I gave the reasons for for some additional doubts of my own. I provided a peer-reviewed article as the basis for these additional doubts. You have not addressed the bases for either my doubts or the uncertainties expressed by the researchers in the article. Instead you descended into an ad hominem attack on what you appear to assume to be selective doubt raising on my part.
The article moves from gross levels of scientific uncertainty of various kinds to a statement of certainty. The conclusion of the article is:
“The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle — something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works”.
In this context, your words were: ‘Our main way has just been tripled.’ For good effect you propose some maths applying this statement to temperature predictions.
You may wish to withdraw the statement, clarify it, qualify it, or even acknowledge that there is no science underpinning the statement. You might modify the statement to agree that it is speculative and well worth pursuing in terms of further scientific research. Then again, you may even try to persuade the sceptical amongst us to accept the statement as it stands.
The Keenlyside stuff looks interesting. The full reference is at Keenlyside et.al. (2008) “Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the
North Atlantic sector” Nature 453, 84–88 (http://xrl.us/bevsxk), and there’s an interesting less technical explanation in the same issue on page 43. It’s quite an interesting read, and maybe if true buys us a little bit of time compensating for the appalling policy vacuum of the last two decades.
It’s interesting how the contrarians will use models when it suits them (hey look at Keenlyside, maybe it’s not so urgent after all!) but given that I’ve got environmental science texts on my bookshelves from the late 80s that basically say that when AGW kicks in we’ll see warming at the arctic first, which is well and truly being confirmed by observations now. The effects of warming in high lattitudes and at altitude is obvious, and rapid, but the contrarians don’t like to admit that this is just confirming the models, and quite possibly closer to the “worst case” end rather than the end we would all want it to be at.
136 Boerwar
A very scholarly analysis. Suggest you send it to the ‘Economist’ letters page and preface it with ‘SIR’.
Perhaps the ‘Economist’ science and technology writer has satisfied him or herself that the certainty in the final sentence is justified. Perhaps the rise and sinking of the Thaliaceans could best be described as a ‘known unknown’ instead of an ‘unknown unknown’.
for kdkd and Boerwar:
ECOENG makes the point that *All of this may mean that we have simply overestimated the amount of warming that results from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide*.
This could also mean that the oceans are absorbing more carbon dioxide without warming and that ‘known unknowns’ like the ‘jelly pump’ *could* be factors in that.
Notice I said *could* – wouldn’t want to claim something that wasn’t peer reviewed would I?
I am heartened by the lack of dissent about my ‘non-peer reviewed’ statement that the climate models produce very poor correlations with the Holocene when run backwards (hindcasts).
ie: “Consider the logical absurdity that climate models run very poor correlations backwards with known historical data, yet are trumpeted by AGW theorists as reliable predictors of the future where the input factors going forward are increasingly unknown or just plainly unknowable 40-50 years hence.”
Given that even Coby Beck uses the Wikipedia Holocene Temperature Chart and it shows a cooling trend of about 0.5 degC over the last 8000 years with the averaged curve (the thick black wriggly line) showing approx nine peak-trough temperature swings in the amplitude range of about 0.4 degC.
Reference link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.pngs
Crikey featured expert Andrew Glikson has stated that the Earth’s atmosphere/ocean system is sensitive to even minor forcings and temperature changes of 0.2 to 0.4 degC have ended civilizations. All of which happened without human release of ‘industrial’ scale CO2 at all!
On this point it seems that Dr Glikson and Prof Plimer agree – human civilizations have risen and fallen due to climate change in the Holocene.
Which brings me back once again to my key point; unless you can ‘hindcast’ climate computer models to the accuracy of Dr Glikson’s ‘civilization ending’ 0.2-0.4 degC – then you cannot know that all the natural input forcings and their complex relationships (background noise) are accurately computer modelled at all.
If you do not accurately model the background noise temperature signal then you cannot accurately separate out the effect of industrial release of CO2.
The issue of ‘known unknowns’ then becomes an urgent topic for research eg. clouds, aerosol effects, biological processes – even Thaliaceans.
Even if you got accurate climate ‘hindcasting’, computer modelling with a number of variables compounded over say 40 years forward to 2050 or 90 years to 2100 would have all the mathematical error of compounding. Tiny errors in the accuracy of one variable can produce large errors in results when cycled many many times.
Unless you can time travel and send back corrective readings every few years – I don’t see how the ‘compounding’ error problem of computer model forecasts could ever be solved.
Over to you boys..
Ken,
Your holocene chart doesn’t support your argument. From the wikipeda page: “Because of the limitations of data sampling, each curve in the main plot was smoothed and consequently, this figure can not resolve temperature fluctuations faster than approximately 300 years. Conveniently this also exposes your hindcasting furphy as well. To understand this, you’ll have to think two things. Firstly, what can we directly observe now (answer: lots), and what can we directly observe from the past (answer: comparitively, not much). So, the models we can run that are based on actual collected climatic data are of course going to have different resolution from reconstructions of past climate. In fact you may not have notices, but reconstructions of past climate are also models (admittedly based on the measurement of some geophysical phenomena, but models nonetheless). The available models of current climate are a bit like a 30cm ruler, able to measure at the precision somewhere between 0.5mm and 2mm (depending on the quality of the ruler), while, in comparison, the holocene model is like a 300km ruler, which can maybe meaure to the precision of a kilometer. While we can align our 30cm ruler up to the end of our 300km ruler to get an idea of the differences of behaviour at scale, because our scale is time rather than space, we can’t actually align our model up further back on the scale. The only thing we can do further back in time is to estimate precision based on the current data. So your request for hindcasting seems of very little relevance.
Your assertion that the world is cooling doesn’t stack up either. As stated, the precision of 300 years means that estimates of current temperature based on the holocene model actually encompass pre- and post-industrial society, including clear confounding factors like smog and aerosol production. You’ll need at least another 300 years to get a single worthwhile data point to see if you’re correct, which would be rather amazing seeing as all the global climate models I’m aware of seem to be underestimating the amount of observed warming in recent history.
In conclusion, trying to treat science and statistical modelling as a sub-discipline of economics is a fool’s errand. Your approach simultaneously overstates uncertainty, while simultaneously understating uncertainty based on your own subjective biases. Proper application of scientific method generally minimises the effect of the latter while trying to provide good estimates of the degree of “objective uncertainty”. Very creative, but must fit the limitations of the observed data more closely there fore grade D
kdkd #142
Here is a quick summary of what I see in this Wikipedia Holocene Chart:
1) The average “0″ baseline is a mid-20th century temperature. The trend over the last 8000 years is a *fall* in temperature of approx 0.5 degrees C
2) The heavy black wriggly line (the average of all 8 proxies) has a peak to trough amplitude of about 0.4 deg C
3) There are 5 peaks in this average above the mid-20th century temperature – all occuring in the 4000 – 8000 year BP range.
4) There are 4 peaks below the mid-20th century average, all in the 800 – 3500 BP range.
5) The range of trough to peak time interval is 200-500 years.
6) The last trough was about 350 years ago (little ice age) around 1650 which bottomed out at an average of approx 0.5 deg C *below* the mid-20th century baseline.
7) The average today (2004 on this Chart) is still approx 0.2 deg C below the mid-20th century baseline.
Note *I am not sure if the 300 year resolution applies to the last 2000 year inset – it would not make much sense if it did* Maybe kdkd could clarify this.
9) The 8 proxies have much greater swings in temperature from -1.3 deg C to +1.5 deg C (2.8 deg C) over 8000 years.
10) When you look at this time scale you can see that the steepness of the averaged curve (the rapidity of the temperature changes) are not vastly different and the last 350 years is of comparable steepness to rises occuring at roughly 2200, 3400, 4600, 5300, 6400, 7300 and 8000 years BP.
CO2 (not plotted on this chart) rose from about 260 to 280ppm over most of this 8000 year period up until about 1850. Ice core data gives CO2 rising from about 290-310ppm from 1850 to 1950, and from 310-380ppm from 1950 to present.
When you look at the whole AGW case, it nearly all rests on the last 40-50 years of ‘recent proxy’ temperature readings (often quoted in the NH only), and the human release of CO2 over the ‘industrial revolution’.
Well, the industrial revolution really only got going from about 1800 onward, and CO2 levels had only risen to about 310ppm by 1950.
Temperatures started continuously rising from a trough in about 1650, which is roughly 200 years *before* CO2 levels started a more rapid rise. Warming was happening anyway, and its (non-CO2) contribution (noise) to the observed rise is never discussed in the AGW story.
The Holocene has been remarkably stable (compared with previous interglacials) with a 0.5 degree C cooling trend over the last 8000 years, and the Wikipedia averaged chart shows approx nine (9) peak-trough temperature swings in the amplitude range of about 0.4 degC in the averaged smoothed curve -not the proxies, which have an amplitude range of about 2.8 degC.
Even with this relative stability, Dr Glikson finds that human civilizations have ended with temperature changes of 0.2-0.4 degC.
kdkd – if you have better information please reveal it. You referred us to Coby Beck who was using the same Wikipedia Chart for the Holocene time scale.
Your discussion of the time scales is confusing. There is plenty of historical data of what happened in the last 2000 years back to Roman times, and information from antiquity which can be cross referenced with proxies. For sure the further back you go, the poorer the resolution of the data.
Dare I say (non-peer reviewed) Prof Ian Plimer (Heaven + Earth) has dozens of references to proxies back to the Bristlecone pine (8000 years old), and a swathe of cross referencing to historical events such as the Roman Warming, Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age.
Much of this temperature variation was temporarily lost by the IPCC in the Mann hockeystick interpretation of the Holocene.
I assume you prefer Coby Beck’s last 8000 years to Mann’s?
I don’t think you addressed my point about the mathematical uncertainty of compounding when running forecasts forward 40 to 90 years. Is this point a subjective bias on my part?
Ken @ 141
It seems that you have accepted my point about the lack of science underpinning the conclusion of the Economist’s article that:
“The carbon cycle has thus acquired another epicycle — something that will have to be added to computer models of how the climate works”.
You also appear to have agreed with me that there is a lack of science underpinning your post, which stated: ‘Our main way has just been tripled.’
Further, with your reference to ‘Known unknown’ we appear to have reached agreement on another point I made in an earlier post. I pointed out that the Economist’s article was in the nature of a useful speculative chat.
To draw our two points together, thaliaceans may contribute significantly to oceanic carbon sinks and are therefore a useful focus for further research.
In my view that is what the researchers in the article were actually trying to say as well, and that it was the writer in The Economist who appears to have gone a bridge too far.
Ken:
Ian Pilmer was excoriated on radio national over the weekend. I know that these are self serving IPCC scientists that are doing the excoriation and therefore part of the conspiracy, but I’m glad to see that the reviewers on the radio are accusing him of the kind of selective reporting and intellectual incoherence that I’m accusing the climate change contrarians on this forum of ( http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2589206.htm http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2009/2586947.htm ).
Re the Holocene chart. The black line on recent proxies ought to be based on the same methodology as the black line in the main chart, i.e. with 300 years resolution, otherwise there’s no intellectually coherent case for presenting those data together [edit: here we go: "Note that the short-term proxies are not at all used in constructing the average itself." ].
The additional information I have is a bit more than a decade of training in statistical methods (admittedly in the human and life sciences, so I defer to expertise and consensus on geological/meterological issues). I’m thoroughly brainwashed in scientific method, so although I’m working as an industrial sociologist at the moment, the scientific process has a major influence on my approach. Back to topic. You can’t directly compare individual data points at time t, with smoothed averages based on indirect observations over a much longer time period. It only makes sense to compare smoothed averages with smoothed averages. On the 2000 year timescale we’re still only at the beginning of the warming trend, and the direct observations we have over the most recent 150 odd years are confounded by a number of factors, some of which we can control for (e.g. lack of precision of parts of the measurement system), and some of which we can’t (e.g. the albedo effect of increased SO2 emissions). In the inset chart, it seems to me, that (a): the gradient of the line of best fit of the proxies increased dramatically some time in the mid 20th century, and (b): getting enough data to demonstrate that this is a statistically significant effect over the whole 2000 year time period of the chart would be tricky. Oh yes, (c) all the science points to strong lags in the system that the policy vacuum of the last 20-30 years has done its best to overcome.
Hope this helps
I think you’ll find that the organisms are not sinking to the ocean floor, but to the thermocline, under 100 m or so of stirred water. There is a large accumulation of organic matter there, which can be stirred up again when storm waves get large enough. Carbon dioxide does get drawn down into the deeper oceans by downwellings of cold water, particularly at the Antarctic Convergence, but the oceans remain largely oxygenated. I think the main long-term sink in the oceans is limestones laid down by living organisms in shallower water. That is, until they are suppressed by acidification.
Boerwar@146
It seems that you are determined to have a small win here – so I will not disappoint. It the interests of rigour I will rephrase my extrapolation from the ‘Economist’ report.
The overarching ‘could’ from Post #137 has just been transplanted to;
‘Our main way *could* have just been tripled.’
Happy now?
kdkd #147
I read the Ockhams’s razor transcript before it was broadcast. I thought the attack on Prof Plimer was pretty weak. It attacked a couple of minor points and avoided Prof Plimer’s main thrusts.
If I was not having so much fun with the Cage Fight, I would be further advanced than page 133 of *Heaven + Earth*. We are already at reference No. 599. The book is 493 pages and the last reference is No. 2311.
The story so far is somewhat repetitive, rambling but robust on a central theme ; the Sun did it! viz:
The Sun was thoroughly ignorant of the perfidious release of CO2 by industrialized humanity, and kept doing what it has been doing through geological time : causing climate change on Earth and on other planets in the Solar system.
All that 0.2-0.4 degC temperature change that *ended civilizations* according to Dr Glikson was a result of natural ‘forcings’ mainly caused by the Sun and its spots, wobbles, recessions, progress through the galaxy, progress in orbit, solar wind and influence on cosmic radiation.
When I finish Prof Plimer’s book I will give you all an update.
By the way, Prof Plimer is a combative character and has done over the ‘creationists’ -that other bunch of religious zealots – so don’t be surprised if he whups the newest of new age religions – anthropogenic global warming.
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